Congratulations to December 2013 MEES Graduates

Ph.D. - Habibul Bakht, Kevin Meyer

M.S. - Blessing Edje, Emily Tewes, Vanessa Vargas, Sadaf Yahyai

Student News:

Rebecca Lazarus, a MEES doctoral candidate working with Drs. Barnett Rattner and Mary Ann Ottinger, received a student travel award to attend the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry meeting in Nashville, TN in November 2013.

Two MEES students will be starting Sea Grant Knauss Fellowships in February. Tamara Newcomer (MEES doctoral candidate working with Dr. Sujay Kaushal) is going to be Sea Grant's Natural Resource Specialist. Emily Tewes (an M.S. graduate under Dr. Brad Stevens) will be the NOAA Climate Board Coordinator for the NOAA Climate Program Office.

The Ecological Society of America’s 2014 recipients of its annual Graduate Student Policy Award include Brittany West Marsden, a MEES doctoral candidate working with Dr. Maile Neel. The student awardees will participate in policy training sessions as well as meetings with decision-makers on Capitol Hill in April.

Sarah Rains, a MEES M.S. student working with Dr. Mike Wilberg, has been awarded a fellowship to work with the NSF- funded National Socio-Economic Synthesis Center (SESync). As part of her fellowship Sarah will be working on a project to assess the effectiveness of commercial fishery management policies for blue crab throughout the United States.

Crystal Romeo Upperman, a doctoral student working with Dr. Amir Sapkota, is part of the three-person team awarded the $10,000 University of Maryland Council on the Environment Green Fund Fellowship for their application entitled “Redefining the Concept of ‘Green:’ the Fate and Characterization of Nanomaterials in the Anacostia Watershed.”

Jan Vicente, a MEES doctoral candidate working with Dr. Russell Hill, was awarded the runner-up prize for his oral presentation “Diversity and functionality of microbial symbionts associated with a two-sponge symbiosis in the Caribbean” at the 10th Annual International Marine Biotechnology Conference (IMBC).

Alumni News:

In December 2013, Dail Laughinghouse (MEES 2012 PhD under Dr. Patrick Kangas) started a new postdoc position at Smith College on the NSF Funded Open Tree of Life focusing on Phylogenomics of the Microbial Tree of Life.

A new study published in Nature and co-authored by Drs. Chris Moore and Daniel Obrist of Nevada’s Desert Research Institute establishes, for the first time, a link between Arctic sea ice dynamics and the region’s changing atmospheric chemistry potentially leading to increased amounts of mercury deposited to the Earth’s northernmost and most fragile ecosystems. Chris received his PhD from MEES, working with Dr. Mark Castro, in 2011. Christopher W. Moore, Daniel Obrist, Alexandra Steffen, Ralf M. Staebler, Thomas A. Douglas, Andreas Richter & Son V. Nghiem.Convective forcing of mercury and ozone in the Arctic boundary layer induced by leads in sea ice. Nature (2014) doi:10.1038/nature12924

MEES Alumnus Jacques Ravel just received two major NIH awards: A five-year, $2,698,000 grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) at the National Institutes of Health for the study “Influence of Modifiable Factors on the Vaginal Microbiota and Preterm Birth” and a five-year, $2,650,000 grant from NINR for the study “Revealing the Role of the Cervico- Vaginal Microbiome in Spontaneous Pre-term Birth.” Jacques is a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the School of Medicine and Associate Director for genomics at the Institute for Genome Sciences. He completed his Ph.D. in the MEES Program in 1999, co-advised by Dr. Russell Hill and Dr. Frank Robb.

Faculty News:

Dr. Donald Boesch is one of five new members to join the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative’s distinguished Leadership Council, an influential group of ocean leaders tasked with changing the way we manage the nation’s oceans and coasts. The Joint Initiative was created in 2005 as a collaborative effort between the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy and the Pew Oceans Commission. Since its formation, it has sustained a broad-based, bipartisan effort to influence meaningful ocean policy reform and action at the national, regional, and state levels.

Following a
nomination by Chapter AH, Easton, Maryland, Dana Bunnell-Young (doctoral candidate with Dr. Thomas Fisher) was
awarded a P.E.O International Scholar Award for 2014. On a competitive basis, the
organization awards $15,000 scholarships to women pursuing a doctoral degree. Dana is also a “National Geographic Young
Explorer,” having been awarded one of their coveted grants this year and is the
recipient of a competitive National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation
Improvement Grant.

Brittany Marsden (a MEES doctoral candidate working with Dr.
Maile Neel) was awarded the Maryland Environmental Education Scholarship
for Academic Study by the NAAEE (North American Association for
Environmental Education).

Matthew Parker (a MEES doctoral student working with Drs.
Reginal Harrell and Douglas Lipton) is a co-PI on a grant recently funded by the
National Sea Grant Office entitled “Sea Grant Aquaculture Extension 2013
Evaluation of Innovative Practices for Sustainable Aquaculture Development in
Chesapeake Bay.” Matt will be working on
estimating the value of ecosystem services of oyster farms in the bay modeling
nutrient cycling on aquaculture farms with Dr. Suzanne Bricker, Manager of
NOAA's National Estuarine Eutrophication Assessment, National Centers for
Coastal Ocean Science.

Michael Pennino, a MEES doctoral candidate working with Drs.
Sujay Kaushal and Andrew Miller, was awarded the Joan Ehrenfeld Award for Best
Student Presentation in Urban Ecology at the 2013 Ecological Society of America
meeting.

Ryan Powell, MEES doctoral candidate working with Dr. Russell Hill, received the
best poster award at the 2013 MEES Colloquium for his poster entitled, “Rapid
Harvest of Microalgae Using a Novel Bacterial Isolate.”

MEES doctoral student Rhea Thompson (advisor Dr. David Tilley) has been awarded the
National Science Foundation Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation
Bridge to the Doctorate Fellowship at the University of Maryland. The Fellowship is a highly competitive program
designed to encourage and support UMCP graduate students pursuing degrees in
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Dail Laughinghouse, MEES Ph.D. in 2012 under Dr. Patrick
Kangas, has been doing postdoctoral research in Antarctica and the Arctic with
the Universite de Liege. In November, he
will start a new position on an NSF Microbial Tree of Life grant.

Courtney
McGeachy, a 2012 MEES M.S. graduate under Dr. Bradley Stevens, has been
promoted to Coordinator, Marine and Coastal Conservation at the National Fish
and Wildlife Foundation.

Aaron Watson, MEES 2013
Ph.D. under Dr. Allen Place, will be starting a position in November as Assistant
Marine Scientist at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources’ Marine
Resources Research Institute in Charleston, SC.

Faculty News:

Dr. Madhumi
Mitra, along with co-authors Abhijit
Nagchaudhuri and Corrinne Johnson Rutzke, was awarded the Best Paper
published within the Energy Conversion and Conservation Division (ECCD) of the American
Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) for the paper entitled, “Energizing
the STEAM Curricula with Bioenergy and Bioproducts.”

Congratulations to August
2013 MEES Graduates:

Student News:

Hillary Lane, a MEES doctoral student working with Dr.
Thomas Miller and Dr. Kennedy Paynter, has been appointed as the UMCES Representative
on the Student Advisory Council to the Maryland Higher Education Committee.

Alumni News:

The NOAA
Administrator’s Award is NOAA's highest honorary award and recognizes employees
who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, skill, and ingenuity in their
significant, unique, and original contributions that bring unusual credit to
NOAA, the Department of Commerce, and the Federal Government. The 2013
award for the National Ocean Service
(NOS) is being presented to the team of Dr. Michael J. Dowgiallo for leading foundational research and
consensus-building which established the new scientific field of deep
light-dependent coral ecosystems.
Michael received his MEES doctoral degree under Dr. Marjorie Reaka in
2004 and is currently the Chief of NOAA NOS’s Regional Ecosystems Research
Branch.

Dr. Nikisa
Jordan George (MEES Ph.D. 2009 under Dr. Raymond Hoff) is the 2013 National Women
of Color STEM Conference Technology
Rising Staraward winner. Nikisa is employed by Northrop
Grumman Electronic Systems (NGES), Space Division, in Asuza, California as a
Systems Engineer. She is responsible for Modeling and Analysis, specifically
phenomenology and algorithm development, for ATMS and SSMIS, to determine the
retrieval of brightness temperatures along with temperature and humidity
sounding.

Dr. Robin Van
Meter, MEES 2011 Ph.D. under Dr. Christopher Swan) has started a new
position as an Assistant Professor at Washington College (Maryland) in
Environmental Science and Biology. Previously Robin was an ORISE Post-doctoral
Associate with the U.S. EPA’s Ecosystems Research Division in Athens, GA.

Faculty News:

At the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in
August, Dr. David Inouye (Department
of Biology, UMCP) began a three-year term on the ESA's Board of
Governors. He will serve this year as President-elect, will be President
during the Society's 100th anniversary year, and then Past-President for
year. The ESA's 100th anniversary annual meeting will be held in
Baltimore, in August 2015.

MEES
News June 2013

Congratulations to May
2013 MEES Graduates:

Ph.D. - Kristi Shaw,
Jindong Zan

M.S. - Hakme Lee,
Belita Nguluwe

Student News:

Dana Bunnell-Young, a doctoral candidate under Dr. Tom Fisher, was award a 2013-2015 NSF
Dissertation Award for her MEES dissertation on anaerobic oxidation of methane
coupled to denitrification in the Choptank Basin (MD USA). Dana was also
awarded a National Geographic Young Explorers Grant.

John Gardner,
MEES M.S. student working with Dr. Tom Fisher, has been awarded a Maryland
Water Resources Research Center Summer Fellowship and a grant from the Izaak
Walton League. John’s research involves
the role of streams in nitrogen fluxes from watersheds in the Choptank River
basin.

Tamara Newcomer,
a MEES doctoral candidate working with Dr. Sujay Kaushal, has been awarded a
2014 Knauss Fellowship.

Zuria, I., & Gates,
J. E. (2013). Community composition, species richness, and abundance of birds
in field margins of central Mexico: local and landscape-scale effects. Agrofor. Syst., 87(2), 377–393.

Alumni News:

Renee Gruber (M.S. degree
under Dr. Michael Kemp) is currently at the University of Western Australia
working on her Ph.D. investigating physical controls on nutrients and
productivity of coral reef ecosystems. Following receipt of her MEES degree,
Renee took a position working in Sydney, Australia at the New South Wales
Office of the Environment and Heritage, Estuaries and Catchments Unit, where
she worked for studying estuarine seagrasses and their responses to
eutrophication and climatic forces. In
August 2012 she matriculated into the School of Earth and the Environment at the
University of Western Australia, with Professor Ryan Lowe serving has her
research advisor. Visit her website at http://www.see.uwa.edu.au/research/postgrads?profile/1/id/4052.

MEES
News April 2013

Student
News:

Tamara Newcomer, a doctoral candidate working with Dr. Sujay
Kaushal, has been awarded an Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship by the
University of Maryland Graduate School.
The fellowship will support Tammy as she completes her dissertation
entitled “Nitrogen uptake and denitrification in restored and degraded-urban
streams: impacts of organic carbon and integrated stormwater management.”

Sara Rowland, a MEES doctoral
student under Dr. Frank Robb, has been awarded a Fellowship by the National
Science Foundation’s East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes (EAPSI)
program. Sara will be joining a
collaborating laboratory at the Korean Institute of Ocean Science and
Technology (KIOST) in Seoul for most of the summer of 2013.

Danielle Zaveta
is the recipient of the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory’s 2013 Drach-Mellody
Navigator Award for student research for her research focusing on using RNA:DNA
ratios as a tool to measure habitat quality in blue crab. Danielle’s
research is part of her M.S. degree that she is completing under the guidance
of Tom Miller. The Drach-Mellody
Navigator Award is an annual award made by the CBL faculty to promote
excellence in graduate research.

Alumni News:

Katrin Bockstahler
Rudge (1992 MEES M.S.)has
been named Sarasota County’s Teacher of the Year for 2013-2014. Katrin teaches marine science at Riverview
High School and is Director of the school’s Aquascience Program.

Melanie Harrison (MEES 2011 Ph.D. under Dr. Andrew Miller and
Dr. Peter Groffman) was elected to the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Council
as early career scientist member 2013-2015. Melanie is currently a water quality
specialist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, Protected Resources
Division, at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Paul Collodi, professor, and Ten-Tsao
Wong, research associate, both in the Purdue Department of Animal Sciences,
"Large-scale Production of Infertile Fish for Aquaculture and the Pet
Industry," $44,233. The innovation could improve production of large
aquaculture operations by preventing the release of farmed fish into the
environment and the spread of invasive species. The funding will focus on how
well the innovation can be applied to large-scale commercial hatchery
operations. The Purdue
Research Foundation-managed Trask Innovation Fund is a technology development
program to assist faculty who have disclosed a discovery to the Purdue Office
of Technology Commercialization and are committed to commercializing the
technology.

Student News:

Jennifer Bosch, a doctoral candidate working with Dr. W.
Michael Kemp, will spend a year as a Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship recipient
at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) headquarters in
Silver Spring, MD. Jen will be a program analyst in NOAA’s Office of
Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes. She will learn about the agency’s
scientific activities and research and its labs, communicating with both the
upper levels of NOAA engaged in policymaking and lab directors and scientists
conducting actual research.

Caroline Coulter was awarded the 2013 Ruth Mathes Scholarship
to study trace metal speciation in coal combustion byproduct effluent. Working
wth Dr. Johan Schijf, she will be studying trace metals originating from power
plants’ coal combustion byproduct (CCB), the solid product produced during coal
combustion. Recent emissions-controlling processes employed in coal combustion
have increased the amount of CCB produced, as well as its enrichment with trace
metals. They will be looking specifically at the CCB placed in surface coal
mines in Allegany and Garrett Counties in western Maryland.

In mid-March, Yuan-yuan Xu will be joining Dr. Johan
Schijf and Dr. Hali Kilbourne to do field work in Anegada, British Virgin
Islands. Along with two graduate students from the University of Puerto
Rico, they will be coring coral boulders washed ashore in either a large
hurricane or during a tsunami. Yuan-yuan and Hali will be using the
chemistry of these cores to reconstruct the climate of the region during the
time of coral growth. The corals washed ashore during an important period
Earth's climate known as the Medieval Climate anomaly and we will be comparing
our record of Northern Caribbean climate with similar records from the
Pacific to test the hypothesis that changes in the Pacific El Niño phenomenon
caused the climate perturbation of the Medieval Climate Anomaly. This
study contributes to our understanding of the magnitude and causes of natural
climate variability, something we need for accurate climate predictions.

Alumni News:

Thomas Bianchi, MEES Ph.D.
in 1987 under Drs. Donald Rice and Rodger Dawson, has been elected an American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow. Dr. Bianchi is currently the James R. Whatley
Chair in Geosciences and Professor, Chemical Section, in the Department of
Oceanography, at Texas A & M University.

Courtney McGeachy (MEES M.S. 2012) accepted a position as
Grant Administrator for the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation in Washington,
DC.

Faculty News:

Dr. Patricia
Glibert, a Professor at the Horn Point Laboratory, has been elected a
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Glibert
is internationally renowned in the field of marine ecological research, particularly
regarding the harmful effects of algal blooms and the effects of nutrient
pollution on coastal marine ecosystems, such as the Chesapeake Bay.

Student News:

Rebecca Lazarus,
doctoral candidate working with Drs. Mary Ann Ottinger and Barnett Rattner,
received the best poster award at the 2012 MEES Colloquium. Her poster entitled “Contaminant exposure and
potential effects to osprey nesting (Pandionhaliaetus) in Chesapeake Bay regions
of concern” received consistently high praise from all judges.

Alumni News:

Benjamin
Fertig, MEES Ph.D. under Dr. William Dennison in 2010, received an Early
Career Travel Award from AERS/CERF to attend the CERF meeting in Mar Del Plata,
Argentina.

Dail
Laughinghouse, MEES August 2012 Ph.D. under Dr. Patrick Kangas, is a Postdoctoral
Research Scientist in Bacterial Physiology & Genetics at the Centre of
Protein Engineering, Universite de Liege, Belgium.

Dot Lundberg, MEES doctoral student working with Brian Needelman, received a 2012 Garden Club of America Award in Coastal Wetlands Studies. Along with her advisor, Dot also was awarded a Maryland Water Resources Grant.

Robert Sabo, MEES student working with Dr. Keith Eshleman, has been awarded a two-year EPA STAR Fellowship to work on water quality in Chesapeake Bay watersheds.

Thorson, J.T., Branch, T.A., and O.P. Jensen. 2012. Using model-based inference to evaluate global fisheries status from landings, location and life history data. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. 69:645-655.

Lisa Kerr (MEES 2008 Ph.D. under Dr. David Secor) was awarded the 2010 W.F. Thompson Best Student Paper Award by the American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists for her paper, Kerr, L.A., S.X. Cadrin, and D.H. Secor. 2010. The role of spatial dynamics in the stability, resilience, and productivity of fish populations: An evaluation based on white perch in the Chesapeake Bay. Ecological Applications 20: 497-507. This is a national competition for papers in fisheries and aquatic sciences and represents the third time a MEES PhD student has received this award (Richard Kraus, 2005; Edwin Niklitschek, 2006).

Faculty News:

Dr. Raymond Hoff received The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Distinguished Public Service Medal (DPSM). The DPSM serves as NASA's "highest form of recognition that is awarded to any non-Government individual or to an individual who was not a Government employee during the period in which the service was performed, whose distinguished service, ability, or vision has personally contributed to NASA's advancement of United States' interests," according to the agency's website. Hoff received his medal "for distinguished service and leadership in Earth observations and their application for societal benefit."

Jennifer Bosch, a doctoral candidate working with Dr. Michael Kemp, and Nicole Mehaffie, an M.S. student working with Dr. Thomas Miller, have been selected as a National Sea Grant Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship finalists. Both will work as executive branch fellows during 2013.

Jan Vicente (MEES doctoral student working with Dr. Russell Hill) has been awarded a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Dr. Nancy Foster Scholarship. This Program recognizes outstanding scholarship and encourages independent graduate level research. The scholarship provides substantial support for Jan's graduate studies over the next three years.

Lisa Wilt, MEES M.S. student working with Dr. Jacqueline Grebmeier, was awarded a College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences Merit Fellowship.

Amy Horneman (2001 MEES Ph.D. under Dr. J. Glenn Morris) was quoted in Times-Georgian, May 28, 2012 in a story on a strain of bacteria, Aeromonas hydrophila, that caused the flesh eating disease, necrotizing fasciitis, which nearly killed a University of West Georgia student. Amy is currently the Chief of Microbiology and Molecular Diagnostics, Veterans Affairs Maryland Health Care System's Medical Center.

MEES alumni Josh Newhard (M.S. in 2009 under Drs. Joseph Love and Douglas Ruby) was quoted in a June 4, 2012 Washington Post article entitled "Contest removes loads of snakeheads from Potomac." In discussing the snakehead populations, the article stated, "Female snakeheads are thought to carry an average of 400 eggs. But four days ago, Josh Newhard, a fish biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, found one with 1,000 eggs after electrifying the water to test stunned fish. That was the most we’ve ever recorded," he said. "It means removing these females could potentially have an impact."

Faculty News:

Dr. Lora Harris has been appointed as a Member-At-Large on the Atlantic Estuarine Research Society (AERS) governing board. AERS is the regional affiliate society for the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF).

Dr. Allen Place, a professor and biochemist with the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology, was honored with President's Award for Science Application by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Dr. Place was recognized for his biological research that takes diverse approaches to address many practical problems, from the causes of toxic algal blooms and ways they can be controlled to formulating sustainable foods used to cultivate fish in aquaculture.

MEES Ph.D. student Jeanette Davis was awarded First Prize for the graduate student oral presentation in the "NOAA Healthy Oceans" category at the NOAA-Educational Partnership Program's Education and Science Forum in March. Her talk about sea slugs as a source of anti-cancer compounds was based on some of her research with her advisor Dr. Russell Hill.

Crystal Romeo, a MEES doctoral student working with Dr. Amir Sapkota, was awarded a first place for her poster presentation at UMCP's Graduate Research Interaction Day. Crystal's poster, Indicators for Examining Potential Chronic Respiratory Effects of Climate Change, was in the Assessing Environmental and Energy Issues theme division. On April 24th, 2012, Crystal was invited to attend an event at the White House where EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson was the guest moderator in discussing women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). She was interviewed by the BET news network about her passion for the sciences and environment: http://www.bet.com/video/newsbriefs/brief/news-women-contribute-to-science-interviews.html. Over the summer she will progress in her doctoral research aiming to quantify the effects of climate change on the exacerbation of asthma while working as a Guest Researcher at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, National Center for Health Statistics.

Dr. Michael Kemp has been awarded the University System of Maryland's highest honor, the Regents' Faculty Award for Excellence, in recognition of outstanding research in the fields of ecology, marine science, and environmental science. A leader in his field, Dr. Kemp has had a major influence on our knowledge of why the Chesapeake Bay and coastal ecosystems around the world have degraded and how they can be recovered.

Commencement 2012 Photos

Check out a few pics from the Spring 2012 UMCP Commencement!

All photography featured on the MEES website are property of MEES Faculty/Students. MEES has been granted permission to display these images. For more information, contact the MEES Office.